New Delhi: A frantic 112 call by a businessman, who reported a daylight armed robbery of Rs 10 lakh, made police launch a manhunt on Tuesday. The twist in the tale emerged when the cops caught the robber.He was the businessman’s son.On Tuesday around 9 am, two masked men allegedly threatened the Mukherjee Nagar businessman by waving a pistol and decamped with Rs 10 lakh cash. The businessman was on his way to deliver the cash to his brother-in-law on behalf of his business partner. The masked duo intercepted him in east Delhi’s Laxmi Nagar. They were on a Scooty.When the businessman approached police to register an FIR, the investigators were sceptical. “The initial theory was that the complainant might have concocted the story to explain away the missing Rs 10 lakh,” a senior police officer said.To verify his claims, police teams began a technical surveillance. For several hours, the cops scanned CCTV footage of 120 cameras at various locations to track the duo to get a clear view of their faces. The one unguaded moment they were looking for finally happened. A mask was lowered, a face exposed, and the case cracked open in the most unexpected way.The investigators tracked the Scooty’s flight through a “CCTV corridor”. The suspects wove through the congestion of Mukherjee Nagar and the chaos of Laxmi Nagar, their faces obscured by masks and helmets. Every time the trail grew warm, the Scooty would dart into a blind spot or vanish into a sea of seemingly identical vehicles.It was an exhausting game of cat-and-mouse on flickering monitors. The suspects were always one frame ahead of the chase.However, the 121st camera yielded the information that the police needed. Near Anand Vihar, the duo thought they had successfully evaded all eyes. The robbers pulled over to a quiet spot. The person riding the Scooty slid his mask off to catch his breath. A camera nearby captured a clear image of the face.Using ground intelligence and informers, police identified and apprehended the man on Wednesday. When the procedure of identifying the man started, the case took a stunning turn. When the complainant was asked to identify the person who had robbed him at gunpoint, he realised the “criminal” was his son.During interrogation, the 20-year-old son confessed that he had planned the robbery with a friend because he was upset with his father who constantly refused to give him money and denied him an allowance. He said he carried out the heist to “teach his father a lesson”.The police found the Rs 10 lakh from a surprising hideout — the boy’s grandmother’s house. The two youths now face charges of armed robbery.
